mquake-whitebox-blackbox-distinction
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/zhong-2023-mquake-s4-mq-uake-challenges-model-editors.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:59:06+00:00
Parameter-editing methods (FT, MEND, ROME, MEMIT) require white-box access to model weights, while MeLLo is designed for black-box LLMs requiring no gradient updates
Summary
Most popular knowledge-editing techniques (like ROME and MEMIT) can only be applied if you have direct access to a model's internal weights, meaning you can modify the numbers inside it. MeLLo removes that requirement entirely, so it works even when you only get to talk to the model through an API and never see its internals — which is the situation most practitioners and enterprises actually find themselves in.